My Very First Vocabulary Mini-Lesson!

Lord of the Vocabulary Words!

Based on William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies

For my Literacy in Middle/High School class, we were tasked to design and teach a 15-minute vocabulary lesson to a small group of classmates. The words we chose came directly from our own units we are currently designing, and we got the chance to teach a mini lesson to prepare us for the rest of our units!

The first step in this process was creating a lesson plan to outline the 15-minute segment addressing the Common Core standars being met and the course of the lesson. This lesson is designed to aid students in their understanding of the overarching themes throughout Lord of the Flies. In order to best understand the themes and motifs throughout the text, identifying important vocabulary words is essential. During this lesson, students will define the words demented, effigy, eccentric, and recrimination. I am teaching these specific words because they are challenging and crucial to being able to analyze the development of complex characters over the course of the text. Using the guiding principles from "The Power of the Word," the following words are considered to be specialized terms: demented, eccentric, and recrimination. This means that their meanings can vary depending on the contexts or content areas.

When determining which words to devote instruction time to, these words are both repeatable and transportable. Throughout both the text and this unit, we will be using words such as “eccentric” to describe characters’ dispositions while also using “recrimination” in light of persuasion and argumentative writing and speaking. These two words will support students in their overall understanding of the text. As the final summative assessment of the unit on Lord of the Flies approaches, using these four words will provide students with the tools they need to create a persuasive speech or a creative writing piece.

Creating and teaching this lesson directly connects to PC 8.2: Applying Knowledge in Meaningful Ways as this takes words from the text itself and uses them to analyze the complex characters throughout Lord of the Flies. By doing this, students are able to better characterize various relationships and how one character might interact with another in a given situation. Throughout the unit, there will be multiple opportunities for students to "become" one of the characters both writing and speaking from his perspective. Most notably, the final performance assessment asks students to write a persuasive speech from the perspective of one of the boys on the island if they were trying to regain control of the group. In order to effectively write a persuasive speech aimed at this specific group of boys, it is essential that the students understand the complex characters and how they might interact with one another and what they might find most compelling in an argument.

These words serve as the foundation for the performance assessment so students are able to characterize the various personalities in the text.

Throughout this process, it has become clear to me that I struggle when participation doesn't happen immediately. I tend to get flustered and think that I haven't given clear and precise directions, so my students are confused, when in reality, people just need some time to think and maybe some extra prompting. Part of teaching is waiting for students to answer questions, which I found very difficult. Watching myself in the video was extremely helpful (and cringeworthy at points!) because I could clearly see the points where I didn't explain things clearly enough, or when I was distracted by my hair and sleeves (a nervous habit!). In terms of feedback, I found that I need to get the timing of my lesson better in the sense that some activities were rushed because I spent too long on other activities. I asked my classmates to watch out for my pacing because I tend to move too slowly through some concepts while moving too quickly on others.

Teaching vocabulary in an English classroom is a common occurence, but using vocabulary as a foundation to read a challenging text requires a different kind of instruction. This requires looking at the words in context rather than simply by themselves. I found this to be somewhat challenging because I knew what the words meant in context of the novel, but some of my classmates have never read Lord of the Flies, so I had to present different scenarios so they understood the reason behind choosing these words for this text. By the end of the lesson, I think that I was successful in teaching the vocabulary because on their exit slips, they all used the words properly in sentences, and said they did not have any lingering questions. On the exit slip, I asked for three responses:

1) Use each word in a sentence to demonstrate understanding. They can be four separate sentences, or one longer sentence with each word.

2) On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you feel that you understand each of these words and how they are used in the context of the novel?

3) Do you have any lingering questions?

In terms of moving forward, I need to focus on interactive activities that extend beyond the use of technology. I found that having everything technology based, while engaging, was difficult because everyone was staring at screens the whole time. When in a classroom, students could be looking at screens in all of their other classes as well and might find themselves distracted by yet another screen. Providing multimodal activities will be imperative in designing effective lessons.

Thanks for listening (reading, I guess) and I hope you enjoyed my lesson! Stay tuned for a reflection on my back-to-back mini lessons coming up!